Warehouse Cost Reduction: How to Yield Immediate Results

A common thread to all warehouse operations is the quest to manage expenses. The most critical and manageable expense item on your P&L statement is labor. Managing labor efficiently will generate immediate results in your quest to manage expenses.

This begins with capturing daily man-hours used by department or activity in categories such as receiving, put-away, replenishment, pick/pack/ship, inventory management, supervision, etc. Capturing the man-hours used can be done with sophisticated warehouse-management system software or a more manual approach. But no matter the method used, you must know how many man-hours are used each day, in each activity.